Beyond Reason: Using Emotions as You Negotiate by Roger Fisher and Daniel Shapiro

Beyond Reason : Using Emotions as You Negotiate – Viking Adult, 2005, ISBN 0-670-03450-9, 256 P. The book is about using emotions in negotiation process. As you can guess, while not naming it this way, they teach to use emotions as anchors. For a trained eye, it’s also interesting that they teach to use them as anchors for a very important meme – the meme of yourself in other people’s minds. Specifically, they suggest five key anchors:

• appreciation – show appreciation for others;
• affiliation – make them feel in association with you, not a competition (even if the second is true);
• autonomy – respect boundaries, don’t step of toes;
• acknowledgement of status – show the boss that you know who is boss when appropriate; and
• “choose a fulfilling role”, or simply define yourself in the way that fits other minds well and lets you to play it.

From a memetics point of view the latter is a sort of carte blanches that covers the rest of points that were not chosen to be separate chapters. But that’s tolerable, keeping in mind that the book is about negotiations, and specifically, about emotions in negotiations, not generally memetics, and it covers a lot of general material on negotiations.